Ernest Gellner

Ernest Gellner, who has died a few days short of his 70th
birthday, was brought up in Prague, in an urban intellectual
Jewish family. He came to England in 1939, aged 13, and went to
school in St Albans, getting a scholarship to Balliol when he
was 17. During the war he served with the Czech Armoured
Brigade, which took part in the siege of Dunkirk and then went
to the victory parade in Prague. He ended a year's military
service as a Private. His experience prepared him to take a
pessimistic view of the future of Czechoslovakia: the Brigade
had two lines of command, one official, the other a hidden
hierarchy of members of the communist party. "There was a man
who was a private who ... had been an officer in the
International Brigade in Spain ... and when he finally crossed
back to Czechoslovakia he suddenly became a lieutenant". In
Bohmeia the Party attracted all the distinctive authoritarian
personalities, and the future "Stalinoid dictatorship" was
apparent even in 1945. He admitted later that he had assumed
that "Stalinism was due to stay for another 300 years, like the
darkness imposed on Bohemia by the Counter-Reformation", and he
put Czechoslovakia out of mind until the late 1960s, when
counter-currents of liberalism became apparent. He returned to
Britain in 1945, completed his studies at Oxford, went to
Edinburgh as a lecturer in philosophy, and two years later
joined the sociology department at the London School of
Economics in 1949 where he remained for 35 years, becoming
Professor of Philosophy with Special Reference to Sociology, and
then Professor of Philosophy. He moved to Cambridge as WIlliam
Wyse Professor of Social Anthropology in 1984. He retired from
Cambridge in 1993, and became head of the centre for the study
of nationalism in the Central European University at Prague. He
was elected to the British Academy in 1974.

At the LSE he came into contact with the social anthropologists
Firth, Schapera and Stirling. Anthropology, at LSE, then, was
attractive because it was concerned with the real world, and
because the discipline offered the possibility of a vigorous
community of scholars producing comparable work and taking
notice of each other. Philosophy was too abstract; the
sociological establishment was evolutionist, with "the younger
people torn between their Marxism and their scientistic
Parsonism". Politics was dominated by Oakeshott, and economics
was "a mixture of second-rate mathematics with very bad
sociology". In 1954 he went climbing with the LSE
mountaineering society, and had to choose between an expedition
to the Himalayas or the Atlas. He went to the Atlas ‹ partly
because he anticipated that the establishment of the State of
Israel would lead to confrontation with the Muslim world, and he
wished to find out more about it. He then began the association
with Morocco and the Berbers of the Central High Atlas that
resulted in Saints of the Atlas. It was a study of how holy
men kept a fragile and broken peace among the shepherds who
moved each spring from the plains of the ante-Atlas into the
high pastures, and back again each autumn: a hundred thousand
people, a million or so sheep traversing the bottle-necks of the
mountain passes twice each year. It was an ideal opportunity for
theft and rustling, and the Saints were there to maintain the
peace without establishing any acceptable claim to political
control. His book, criticised by scholars who have worked in
Moroccan archives, remains important reading because it analyses
so clearly the ways in which pastoral peoples, who had been in
contact with states for a couple of millennia, maintained an
ideology of total rejection of the Moroccan state, and a
determination not to make anything of the kind themselves. Their
practice was more often than not in accord with the ideology.

This was his only monograph based on fieldwork of the
traditional anthropological kind. He maintained his scholarly
and political interest in Islam and in Morocco, organising
conferences and publishing important collections of papers of
his own and others, of which the most notable are Arabs and
Berbers (1973), with C. Micaud and Patrons and Clients in
Mediterranean Societies (1978), with John Waterbury. His own
elaboration of the Moroccan themes is contained in the virtuoso
small monograph on Ibn Khaldun and David Hume which leads the
essays collected in Muslim Society (1982).

From the mid-sixties he began to publish extensively on the
Soviet Union and the satellite states. He was especially
important for bringing work published in Russian to the
attention of English- and French-speaking anthropologists; and
his championship of the work of Anatoly Khazanov was a major
fruit of this branch of his scholarship. It was Gellner, with
some Dutch colleagues, who campaigned successfully to get
Khazanov permission to leave the USSR for Israel. In 1989 he
spent a year in Moscow, intending to study the organisation of
social sciences; but he was present as a witness at the
flowering of perestroika as a moral and intellectual
force, and he made an extensive but informal study of the
changes in the Muscovite academic and literary world in that
crucial year. This was ‹together with his work on
nationalism‹ his consuming interest in the last few years.

Within anthropology he was also important because he brought a
breadth of historical and philosophical learning to the
discussion of what were and are often naive and ignorant
arguments: he was able to show that anthropologists (who often
seem to think they have invented everything) have a context, a
place in history, and that the problems which perplex them have
analogues outside their own discipline. Many of his
contemporaries and seniors did not welcome this kind of
contextualisation of their work; to his students, who remained
devoted and affectionate even if they came later to disagree
with him, this aspect of his work was an enhancement and a
liberation. The other characteristically Gellnerian contribution
to anthropology was his instinct for building simple models of
social systems and social process, and for explaining them with
wit and seductive charm, defending them with great firmness once
he was convinced that he had given the best account so far.

David Glass, the sociologist, once said "with a touch of
irritation", that he wasn't sure whether the next revolution
would come from the right or from the left; but he was quite
sure that, wherever it came from, the first person to be shot
would be Ernest Gellner. Gellner came to anthropology trailing
clouds of controversy caused by his attack on linguistic
philosophy (Words and Things, 1958). In the 1960s, he
wrote about Soviet anthropology partly to provoke Western
Marxists: the Soviet practitioners made subtle and useful
contributions with a framework of ideas that they could
criticise only tacitly. He thought this was much more serious
than the work of Western Marxists, whom he considered used their
Marxisms as a series of rallying-points for recruiting personal
followers in the internecine struggles of the Left. This was
provocative, and he relished that. He was appalled by the
attempts to introduce Wittgensteinian notions and ideas into
anthropology, and combative when these (under the influence of
Geertz in particular) were used to support what he considered to
be a provincial and folksy relativism. He was very serious in
his condemnation of Geertz and Edward Said, though it is clear
that Gellner's ability to joke his way through an argument,
infuriated his opponents. The same was true in his conflicts
with feminists whom he thought were too often tempted by
relativism, or by an inconsistent admixture of relativism with
rectitude.

He was witty, liked anecdotes and gossip, enjoyed other people's
intrigues, and lived intensely with and for his friends and
students. He was deeply loyal to his family.

He had, he said, never had a faith, and had never had a
community. His studies of relatively closed communities
(Moroccan Berbers, Soviet Communists) with faiths that claimed
closure and perfection (Islam, Marxism), was respectful, tinged
with regret, and cahracterised by merciless exposure of
inconsistency and circularity. At the same time he refused to
accept relativist positions, which he regarded as a betrayal of
an intellectual's duty, as a kind of unmanly self-indulgence,
His University Sermon, delivered in King's College Cambridge in
1992, described a world with three kinds of people:
fundamentalists, relativists and "Enlightenment Puritans". He
was a cautious and self-aware (and self-mocking) member of the
the third category, but regarded the "ambiguous, unstable,
uneasy relationship between Faith, Indifference, and
Seriousness" as the condition of contemporary intellectual
life, and even to be accepted "if only one is allowed to
vacillate between the options, and they do not press upon one
too hard".

John Davis, Warden of All Souls
appeared in the Guardian, November 7th, 1995.